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"You Have An Accent Even on Twitter"

"You Have An Accent Even on Twitter"

Written by Paul Oh
March 16, 2011

Twitter birdDespite the seeming limitation of 140 characters to express oneself, it turns out that you reveal regional dialects when tweeting.

This piece from NPR, based on research from Carnegie Mellon University, informs us that, for example, the word “something,” tweeted by people throughout the country, has been found to be reduced to “sumthin” in certain regions. The word is distilled even further to “suttin,” a phrase used almost exclusively in New York City.

Is social media and its short forms of composing, like tweeting, causing written language to move closer to a reflection of spoken language?



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